HISTORY OF JAPAN LIBRARY

JAMES MURDOCH' HISTORY OF JAPAN FROM THE ORIGINS

TO THE ARRIVAL OF THE PORTUGUESE IN 1542 AD

CHAPTER VII

THE EMPEROR KWAMMU. (782 TO 805 A.D.)

AT the date of his accession in 782 Kwammu Tenno had a son (the future Emperor Heijo, 806- 809) six years of age. If succession questions had been then ruled by provisions analogous to those of the present Imperial House Law, that young prince would at once have been recognised as Prince Imperial. But it was not his son, but his own younger brother that the Emperor designated as his successor; and it was only on the death of the latter in 785 that the son’s rights were acknowledged. The Emperor’s younger brother, enraged at having a cherished project thwarted by one of Kwammu’s favourites, instigated the murder of the obstructive courtier, and for this crime his two tools were beheaded, while he himself was condemned to exile in Awaji. As a matter of fact he “died” soon after; and it is an indication of the deep hold superstition then had upon even the most powerful intellects of the time to find how hard put to it the strong-minded Emperor was to appease the wrath of his brother’s offended and vindictive spirit. In 805, when seized with the illness that carried him off in the following year, the records tell us that Kwammu, not finding any benefit in the use of various remedies, caused sacrifices to be made, and prayers for his recovery offered up in all the temples. He also ordered the erection of a temple in Awaji to the manes of his younger brother, and the construction of granaries of plenty in all the provinces. At the same time he directed that the annual revenues should be charged with a contribution of fabrics and of provisions as an offering to the soul of his younger brother, which “had done the Emperor great scathe ”

However, although in some respects unable to emancipate himself from the thraldom of the superstition of the age, Kwammu was far from being at the beck and call of the Buddhist priests, as his predecessors of the Temmu dynasty had been. Much more attention was now paid to the old divinities of the land, while as might have been expected from an Emperor who had honourably distinguished himself as a highly efficient Principal of the University, the study of the secular learning of China was greatly encouraged. Nara, the first permanent capital of the Empire, was now threatening to become a sort of Mount Athos. The influence of its seven great monasteries, to say nothing of its convents, had become too strong for the best interests of the Empire; and Kwammu seems to have been determined from the first to remove the administration and its personnel from the dangerous proximity of the ghostly counsellors who tended more and more to become the real rulers of the Empire. The Emperor must have known that an open and declared breach with Buddhism would have been highly injudicious, if not utterly fatal to his rule, inasmuch as the foreign cult was now the professed religion of almost the whole governing class. All that he evidently aimed at was the lessening of the influence of the old Buddhist hierarchy, as it was then constituted. The priests could only remove their magnificent buildings with the greatest difficulties; the Emperor could remove the capital with comparative ease. In course of time monasteries would doubtless spring up in a new Reat of government; but by astute management they, especially if reared by entirely new sects, could be utilised as a counterpoise to the proud and wealthy ecclesiastics of Nara.

Accordingly, in 784, Kwammu removed the Court to Nagaoka, a spot at the base of the mountains halfway between Yamasaki and Arashiyama,—a good thirty miles from what had been the capital of the Empire for the preceding three- quarters of a century. Nagaoka lay in Yamashiro, and so a solemn mission had been sent to apprise Kamo-myojin, the tutelar Shinto deity of the province, of the Emperor’s intention to settle in his domain and to invoke his beneficent protection. A few years later the young priest Saicho began to level the summit of Hiveizan, as the emplacement for a new fane To the south-west of this height lay a spacious and well-watered plain, some eight or ten miles from Nagaoka, and thither in 793 Kwammu determined to transport the seat of his Court. Everything was done in strict accordance with the requirements of the science of geomancy; the new Temple of Enryaku-ji on Mount Hiyeisan, on the north-east, the quarter whence ill luck and evil influences came, was to serve as the indispensable outpost to deal with malignant demons. The site was found to be under the protecting influence of the four genii who preside over the cardinal points,—the Azure Dragon on the East, the White Tiger on the West, the Red Bird on the South, and the Dark Warrior on the North. A clay statue eight feet high, with casque and cuirass of iron, and bow and arrows in hand, was erected on a hillock to the east of the city (Shogun-dzuka) to serve as a special tutelary deity—a Japanese version in clay of the Pallas Athene on the Acropolis. It was believed that when changes in the Empire were impending this image gave timely warning by bursting into song and moving of itself.

The Imperial Citadel, measuring 1,280 yards from north to south and 1,553 from east to west, and pierced by three gateways on each of its four faces, lay in the northern quarter of the nascent city. In the centre of this inner enclosure stood the palace, with the various administrative departments around it, and the assembly and audience halls in front. On the south the enceinte of the Citadel was approached by a spacious avenue 280 feet in width which ran right down the centre of the outer town to the moat and palisade that marked off the urban district from the open country beyond. On the north and south this rudimentary attempt at fortification extended for 5,027 yards; on the east and west sides it was some 800 yards longer. The city within these limits, which was laid out on a plan analo­gous to that of the modern Philadelphia, was thus more than four times as extensive as the Quaker City was before 1854. The great avenue leading up from the South to the main palace entrance divided the metropolis into two great sections,—an East and a West. Parallel with this ran three wide streets on each side, while the whole breadth of the city was traversed by nine avenues, varying in width from 80 to 170 feet, and intersecting the north and south streets at right angles. In addition to all this there were numerous lanes. In laying out the town, the house unit adopted covered 100 feet by 50. Eight of these units made a row, four rows a block, four blocks a division, and four divisions a district, of which there were nine. Altogether there were 1,216 blocks and 38,912 houses. What the population actually was it is difficult to say, for the Japanese household was then much larger than it is today, when it consists of about five individuals on the average. However, there is reason to believe that in the ninth and tenth centuries Constantinople and Cordova were the only two European cities that exceeded the Japanese capital in the matter of population. In magnificence, however, Kyoto could not aspire to vie with these, for the general aspect it presented must have been sombre in the extreme. The low one-storied flimsy houses, mostly roofed with shingles, opened upon inner courts of miniature gardens which indeed were pleasing to the eye; but the front effect was about as picturesque as that of a prison or a barrack wall. Some of the buildings did indeed boast roofs of slate­ coloured tiles, while the glint of the green-glazed tiles of the palace imported from China must have imparted an element of cheerfulness into the prospect when the sun shone. In its architecture even the palace was more remarkable for its chaste simplicity than for its splendour. Such was the city founded by Kwammu in 794,—a city destined to be capital of Japan for the long term of 875 years.

Kwammu, like Tenchi, was, as has been said, a sovereign who not only reigned, but also ruled. He did indeed have his Ministers of the Left and of the Right,—Fujiwara among them, but he was not slow to remove them when they gave cause for dissatisfaction; and on several occasions one or other of these posts remained without occupants for considerable periods of time, the work of administration being then conducted by subordinate officers under the Emperor’s personal supervision. The patriot Wake no Kiyomaro, for example, rendered valuable services as the Head of the Home Department, perhaps the most important, and certainly the hardest worked, of all the Eight Boards at that exceptional time.

It was the Mimbusho (Home Department) that was responsible for the collection of the revenue, and everything connected with this. Now for long the sources of the national income had been drying up. This had been regarded as a serious matter in the time of the Nara administration; but it was under Kwammu that circumstances made it imperative that the actual facts of the situation should be frankly recognised, and that drastic remedies should be found for the long standing and ever-growing agrarian abuses which menaced the Imperial authority with atrophy and disaster. The removal of the capital, first to Nagaoka and then to Kyoto, involving as it did extensive building operations, especially in the latter place, proved a severe strain on Kwammu’s financial resources; and when the Ainu revolt developed into a great war of several campaigns, demanding the mobilisation and maintenance of large masses of men in an inhospitable region where there was no hope of making the war support itself, the inconveniences of a depleted treasury into which taxation no longer flowed, but only trickled intermittently, made themselves felt so keenly that the Emperor and his able Home Minister were stirred to vigorous action. To meet the ready excuse of the provincial authorities that difficulties of communication made it impos­sible for them to forward the taxes to the capital, new routes were opened, old roads repaired, bridges built, and ferry-services improved, while the endless and ever-increasing abuses of the horse-post system received at least a temporary check. Strict regulations dealing with the office of provincial governor were enforced. This was nothing very new, for many such regulations,—all to become a dead-letter,—had previously been promulgated from time to time. What was decidedly novel was the attempt to abolish the hereditary tenure of office enjoyed by the district chiefs, or governors. Many of these had succeeded in founding houses that constituted a sort of local aristocracy, which really gave the law to the lieges in the districts where their estates were situated. In virtue of their office these petty magnates held grants of land; in virtue of their office and of their official rank they were exempt from taxation. Under the provincial governor, they had to act as tax-collectors for their districts; and furthermore they had what the provincial governor could not legally exercise,—at first at least,—the cognisance of suits. Thus it was the easiest thing in the world for them to bring judicious pressure to bear upon the non-privileged classes under their jurisdiction. They often did what we have seen the tax-free Buddhist monasteries doing. They, induced peasants to surrender their holdings to them. These holdings then became exempt from taxation; but the peasant-cultivator paid a small rent in lieu of his previous Government dues, which with the rapidly decreasing number of taxable polls tended to become more and more onerous. Hence, of course, all the greater eagerness on the part of the tax-paying remnant of the population to place themselves under the sheltering wing of some one or other of the eight-and-twenty privileged “personalties” exempted from all national fiscal burdens,—Buddhist monastery; Nara or Kyoto courtier; Imperial favourite enriched with a special land grant from the sovereign; or, what was a not uncommon haven of refuge, some local magnate exercising the functions of a district governor. A certain district in Bitchu in 660 had had as many as 20,000 adult males liable to conscription and hence to taxation; in t67 the tax-payers in it numbered less than 2,000, and yet the population had not diminished. Supposing the rate of taxation to have remained constant, this would seem to mean either one of two things. Either the national revenues from this district had meanwhile sunk to ten per cent, of what they had originally been, or the 2,000 tax payers of 767 were contributing as much to the ex­chequer as the 20,000 of 660 had done. As a matter of fact, it was a compromise between the alternatives; while there had been a woeful shrinkage in the national receipts from this dis­trict, the burdens of those who had had to remain steadfast to their obligations as dutiful subjects had vastly increased. Ab uno ditce omnes has at all times been a sophistical injunction; and to suppose that this Bitchu district was a fair illustrative instance of the state of affairs then prevalent in the 550 or 560 similar districts of old Japan would doubtless be a mistake. But even if we grant that this was an extreme case, it is nevertheless highly instructive, for the fiscal malpractices and mal­administration here so luridly disclosed did undoubtedly, although in a minor degree, extend to every one of the sixty-five or sixty-six provinces of the time.

To deal exhaustively with all the various devices adopted to evade the incidence of taxation would require a monograph to it Relf. But to ensure the possibility of attaining a clear general idea of the situation, the leading features of the case may be briefly recapitulated.

In 645-646 the whole soil of the Empire was supposed to be surrendered to the central government, and by 650 most of this was, theoretically at least, distributed among peasants in approximately equal holdings of a few acres for each household. For this land the peasants paid, not rent, but national and local taxes. Their holdings consisted of land of various denominations, the bulk of it being supposed to be inalienable. But the house-lot as well as various other kinds of land were alienable, and thus there was an opening to change the denomination of the inalienable portion for such as wished to dispose of their rice-lands to purchasers. Furthermore there was a rule providing for a six-yearly redistribution of the lands of such as bad died, or disappeared. But this was enforced, if enforced at all, only at very rare intervals, and only in certain limited por­tions of the Empire. The peasants were organised in groups of five households; and the group was held collectively responsible for the default of any of its members. In spite of partial or even total remission of taxes in times of famine or great distress, the farmers very soon began to fall into economic difficulties and were compelled to have recourse to loans. Rice advanced by the authorities in spring was to be collected in autumn with 50 per cent, added. But as a matter of fact the debtors frequently got hopelessly in arrear. In connection with these Government loans, too, a gigantic system of fraud grew up; and the administration was time and again outrageously swindled by its own agents, who at the same time contrived to get the cultivators into their own personal power, financially speaking. Private lenders were also ready to make an exorbitant profit out of the peasant’s dire necessity. Usury laws were of little avail; they were systematically evaded. By as early a date as 685, Temmu Tenno was constrained to make a clean sweep of all plebeian indebtedness. Although this is the earliest recorded precedent for what became not altogether uncommon under the Ashikaga rulers seven or eight centuries afterwards, the remedy was altogether too desperate a one to be frequently resorted to. Ruch relief as the measure afforded was merely temporary. Many of the over-burdened cultivators absconded, and became outlaws. We hear of these for the first time in 670, and again in 677 and 679; and in 731 an edict speaks of bands of vagrants, in some cases several thousands strong, roaming about the country and oppressing the lieges. Some of these bodies made their way to the remote confines of the Empire and founded peaceful industrious communities of their own. One such band, a thousand strong, settled in Osumi in 755; in 759 another twice as numerous established itself on the northern frontier, while in 753, 761, 762, and 769 similar migrations to that quarter are recorded. But the favourite haven of refuge for the outlawed landless man was the household of some grandee, to which he attached himself either as a servant in the capital, or as a retainer or tenant on a tax-free manor in the country. In this way the un taxed dependents of the privileged great houses increased in numbers apace. This state of things must not be mistaken for feudalism, however, for the possession of weapons by private individuals had been strictly forbidden in 701; and in 757, when some of the grandees had ventured to defy the law and to arm their people, a fresh prohibitory edict was issued. In 784 Kwammu dealt still more drastically with a recrudescence of this abuse, in the course of his vigorous campaign against all forms of vagabondage and turbulence.

The reclamation of waste land and the extension of cultivation, so far from augmenting the receipts of the treasury, did much to impoverish it. This may very well seem a hard saying; but it is a perfectly accurate assertion. In 723 it was enacted that those who made new irrigation ditches and dams, and opened land to cultivation, should enjoy the use of the latter for three generations, while new lands cultivated near old ditches and dams should be held for life. Twenty years later, new lands of all kinds were declared to be the permanent and irrevocable possession of the first cultivator and his descendants. Those opened by the provincial governor were alone to revert to the Government at the end of his tenure of office. Every case of reclamation had to be sanctioned by the local authorities; and if the grant was left untilled for three years another person might apply for it. Poor peasants would often fail to comply with the conditions, and then neighbouring tax-free proprietors or their agents would claim the right of entering on the partially opened land, and the local officers usually gave way to them. With capital and abundant labour it was easy for the monasteries and grandees and their agents to open up great stretches of country. And these new estates—the Shoden, or Shoyen—the manors so famous in medieval Japanese history, came to be all exempt from taxation. These estates in their turn constituted so many bases for encroachment upon the petty holdings of the impoverished and overburdened peasantry in the neighbourhood. In many districts whole villages were absorbed into these ever-growing manors. Thus the number of taxable polls rapidly diminished; while the burdens of those that still clung, or were forced to cling, to their holdings increased enormously. And withal there was a most serious shrinkage in the Government revenue.

However, the stream of provincial wealth, although thus diverted from the Treasury, was not entirely deflected from the capital. Many of the manors and the tax free estates in the country belonged to the grandees and officers of the Court, and life in the country at this time possessed no charms for the courtier, who when banished by any chance from the luxury and refinement of Nara or Kyoto was wont to present a spectacle no more dignified or edifying than that of Cicero at Thessalonica, or Ovid at Tomi. So long as this state of things and this frame of mind prevailed there was no great reason to dread the rise of a feudal system. Kwammu evidently perceived that the great revenues of his courtiers would prove of material service when it came to rearing a new city worthy of being the capital of a great empire. At the same time he began to look narrowly into the agrarian question, and made an endeavour to check the ever-increasing latifundia. Outlaws who had attached themselves to great men were re-subjected to the burdens of the personal tax and of forced labour, and runaways were compelled to return to their holdings. Land without labour to work it was, of course, valueless.

Provincial governors, appointed for a short term of years, and removable at pleasure, were not in themselves dangerous. All that was necessary was to bring them more strictly under control, and to ensure a higher standard of faithfulness and efficiency in the discharge of their duties. The Buddhist priests were a menace indeed; so the law of mortmain was revived, and it was enacted that no new temples should be erected without the sanction of the Government. The chief source of danger was the district governor. These officials, of comparatively humble rank, had amassed great properties, and were continually adding acre to acre. Holding office from father to son as they did, they threatened to found families powerful enough to be able to disregard the mandates of the central authorities with impunity. From their wealth neither the treasury nor the capital derived any advantage whatsoever. As has been said, Kwammu tried to break their power by abolishing their hereditary claim to office; but the attempted reform proved abortive, and the old order of affairs was reverted to under Kwammu’s son, Saga Tenno (810-823).

It is not till the reign of Kwammu that we meet with the beginning of a distinct military caste and of that respect for the profession of arms which are generally supposed to have been immemorial characteristics of Japanese civilisation. As a matter of fact, for the first five generations after the Reform of 645 the civil official had been what he is now in China,—almost everything. During that period there had been one great civil war, one considerable rebellion, and several lesser internal disturbances. But all these contests had been fought out by civilians armed for the occasion, and they had all without exception been of very brief duration. Such over-sea expeditions as there had been (in Tenchi's time) had ended in failure. In Junnin’s time (759-764) a Korean expedition of 556 ships, 17,000 sailors, and 40,000 troops was in the course of equipment when that sovereign was deposed; but it came to nothing. In Gensho’s reign (715-723) Tanegashima had been conquered and annexed, and the Hayato of Satsuma and Osumi had been at least nominally subdued; although as a matter of fact they had to be very tenderly dealt with and humoured and favoured in many ways before they became dutiful subjects.

In 720 the Ainu had made it necessary to call out the militia of nine provinces before Fujihara no Umakai, the civilian commander sent against them, could retrieve the situation, lie succeeded in making many prisoners of war, who were distributed in small settlements over the Empire; and he built the fortress of Taga, some 50 miles north of Sendai, and garrisoned it with a force of farmer-soldiers as the extreme outpost of the Empire. It was nominally the capital of the province of Mutsu, an immense tract of unsubdued and uncivilised country, which could then only by a great stretch of courtesy be characterised as a sphere of influence. Between this and the Sea of Japan lay the so-called province of Dewa, constituted in 712; but over it the Nara authorities exercised no more effective restraint than the State of Virginia did over the Indians on the left bank of the Mississippi in the year 1776. In the Nara times, the whole of the 116,000 odd square miles of the superficies of the Empire was portioned out into some 65 or 66 provinces, and of that the two so-called provinces of Mutsu and Dewa covered almost a fourth part! And these great provinces were held, and stubbornly and tenaciously held, by an aboriginal race that obstinately refused to submit itself and its fortunes to the civilising influences of the Sinicised Yamato Empire. For centuries these aborigines had maintained a most determined contest against the Southern invader. On the whole they had been losers; but they had generally been able to follow up their worst defeats by desperate and formidable rallies. It was not a case of white man with firearms against Indian with tomahawk and bow and arrows. The weapons of the combatants were practically the same; while as a fighting-man the Ainu hunter was perhaps on the whole superior to the Japanese agriculturist, who constituted the bulk of the national Yamato levies down to Kwammu’s times. Where the Ainu fell short was in the material resources neces­sary for the maintenance of a series of campaigns and in organisation.

In 776 some of the Ainu chieftains on the frontier re­opened the strife; and although the Japanese commander sent word to Nara that he had reduced them to obedience, Taga and all its munitions of war and supplies were in their hands by 780. They massacred the Japanese commandant and most of the garrison, and spread terror through the whole of the Kwan to. In 781, 100,000 koku of rice were sent as supplies to the levies operating against them, which seem to have obtained some advantages in the course of the campaign of that year. Eight years later, in 789, the Ainu beat the Japanese both on land and sea. In a great engagement they lost only 89 men and killed as many as 3,000 of the Imperial troops. In the following year 400,000 koku of rice were forwarded for the use of the army in Ainu-land. A series of campaigns followed in the course of which Saka-no-Uye Tamura Maro rose to fame.

This Tamura Maro is one of the most picturesque figures in old Japanese story. Descended from that Achiki who had brought the Chinese books and the stallion and the mare from Pakche in 404, and who had then settled in Japan as Master of the Imperial Stables, he, in common with an elder brother of his, worthily maintained the traditions of his ancestors. They were both famous for their accomplished horsemanship, and the elder brother held command of the Imperial Guard at the time of his death in 786. Tamura Maro, we are further told, “was a man of a very fine figure. He stood five foot five, and measured fourteen inches across the chest. He had eyes like a falcon’s and a beard of the colour of gold. When he blazed forth in wrath he terrified birds and animals with his look; but when he jested children and women joined in his laughter.” In a sense the originator of what was subsequently to develop into that renowned samurai class, he provided in his own person a worthy model for the professional warrior on which to fashion himself and his character. In battle a veritable war-god; in peace the gentlest of manly gentlemen, and the simplest and most unassuming of men.

The Kwanto, that is the eight provinces around and between the head of Tokyo Ray and the Chichibu and Nikko mountains, had been from the earliest times a great problem to the Yamato authorities. This expanse of 12,000 square miles of exceedingly fertile territory was nominally an integral part of the Empire. But, on account of the difficulties of communication, it really bore pretty much the relation to the Japanese capital that New England, Virginia, and the Carolinas bore to England about the middle of the eighteenth century. Like the American plantations, the Kwanto had problems and interests of its own. Its distance from the capital, its freer and rougher and more vigorous conditions of life, fostered a spirit of independence and self-reliance among its inhabitants that was unknown in the home provinces. It was the Kwanto that had to bear the brunt of the great Ainu raids, and the solitary settler had here often to trust to his own good right hand for protection. Any attempt to enforce the law forbidding the possession of arms by private persons would have been at once injudicious and futile. Hence a military spirit, in the very nature of things, had developed itself. The hereditary district chiefs were the natural leaders of the people; and the district chief, as a rule, was a patriarch with a very numerous household of sturdy sons and grandsons and relatives and dependents. Here was the very finest fighting material in the Empire; and Kwammu had the sagacity to turn it to the national advantage. From each of the eight provinces he raised a battalion of these local gentry, for permanent service against the Ainu. These battalions varied in strength from 500 to 1,000 men each; the whole probably mustered some 0,000 strong. However, this select legion embodied in 782 formed only a fraction of the forces that had to be mobilised before the Ainu were reduced to even temporary subjection. In 789 a force of 52,800 men consuming 2,000 Icoku of rice per diem found itself effectually blocked at Koromogawa, and utterly unable to advance. As a matter of fact it was not till 802 that Saka-no-Uye no Tamura Maro could report that the war was over and ask to be relieved of his command. One thing that hampered the Japanese commanders seriously was the trade that went on between Japanese subjects and the Ainu. For skins and horses, of which they possessed plenty, the latter found it easy to procure weapons quite as good as those in the hands of the Imperial troops. Where the Ainu excelled was in long-range fighting; when it came to close quarters the Japanese claimed that the advantage lay with them. Be that as it may, the fact remains that the hairy aborigines were able to maintain the contest for twenty years, in the course of which they scored more than one considerable victory.

It had already become apparent that the military, or rather militia, system of old Japan stood in need of reform. The men called up for service in the provincial garrisons were supposed to receive a training without entirely ceasing work as farmers and craftsmen. As a matter of fact the only training they often received was in cutting firewood, running errands, and doing odd jobs for the provincial and district officers. In 792 Kwammu made a clean sweep of the whole system. His father, Konin Tenno, had made a tentative effort in the same direction, and had ordered that the so-called garrison troops should be greatly reduced in number, and that during their period of service the men should devote all their time to military duties. But now the personnel of the permanent local forces, still further reduced, was to be henceforth recruited from among the able-bodied sons or relatives of the district chiefs. Outside of Mutsu and Dewa, where an army of more than 50,000 men was operating, and of Kyushu, where a social system was to be inaugurated a score of years afterwards, there were about 500 districts. But in some districts there were extra-chiefs, and as the result of Kwammu’s legislation a good many ex-chiefs, and the sons of these were all equally eligible for enrolment in the new model. All told the number of men now enlisted for provincial service was 3,020, of whom 930 were assigned for duty in the eight provinces of the Kwanto. Kaga was not to become a province until 826; and no mention of Hida or Shima is made in connection with this reorganisation of the military system. The Imperial Guards were not interfered with in Kwammu’s time; in 807 and again in 811 they were nominally reorganised, but their ranks continued to be filled from the households of the district chiefs. In Kyushti, under Saga Tenno (810 -824), the Dazaifu command was fixed at 17,000; but it was shortly afterwards reduced to 9,000 men, none of whom, by the way, appear to have been levied from Satsuma, Osumi, or Hyuga, the country of the ancient Kumaso, whose unruly descendants it was still the best of policy to treat with the greatest circumspection. In 803 the Nagato garrison was raised from 50 to 500 men in consideration of the important strategic position of that province.

This very limited peace establishment was in a measure to serve the purposes of a police. Fires in the provincial granaries where the produce of the taxes was stored had become exceedingly frequent, and it had become the custom to attribute their outbreak to the anger of the native deities whose cult had been neglected. One strange result of the various edicts forbidding the taking of life,—such as that of 749,—had been to excite a great aversion to inflicting the extreme penalty of the law. Thus conscious of immunity from the most serious con sequences of grave crimes, malefactors were increasing in numbers and audacity apace. Kwammu was minded to remedy this condition of affaire. He gave orders for the construction of an “earth-house” (that is, what is now known as a “godown” in the Far East) in each province for the reception of the taxes; and when the governors were found to be slow in erecting these, he abolished the provincial storehouses, and established a granary in each district in which its revenues were to be stored. Henceforth, too, the death penalty was to be inflicted when incurred; and, in the case of arson, immediately, and on the spot, without waiting for the regular process of law. Furthermore, in case of fires in public buildings, all the officials of the district where it occurred and also the provincial officers were to be henceforth held jointly responsible. The chief duty of the 3,920 men of the “New Model” was to guard these district depots. In this “New Model ” and in the eight Kwan to battalions levied for permanent service in Ainu-land we have the germ of the two-sworded privileged class of feudal Japan. All these men, be it observed, were drawn from the households of the hereditary district chiefs, and these chiefs in their turn were generally the descendants of the country gentry of the pre-Taikwa Yamato.

It is in this reign that we first meet with mention of what was to become the title of the real rulers of Japan for centuries. In the twenty years’ war with the Ainu the earlier commanders who had been tried had all been found unequal to the task allotted them. Saka-no-Uye no Tamura Maro (758-811) alone had given incontestable evidence of the possession of undoubted military ability, but down to 796 he had always had to serve in a subordinate capacity. Then he was appointed “Inspector” of Dewa and Governor of Mutsu, and later Great Barbarian-Subduing General (Sci-i-tai-Shogun). Before this there had been hundreds of Shoguns (Generals) in Japan; and a little before there had been an appointment of a “Great East- Subduing General” and a “Great Barbarian-Subduing Commissioner.” These all had been commissioned for a definite, limited, temporary purpose by receiving a setto (“temporary” or “occasion” sword) before their departure from the capital io assume command of the forces with which they were entrusted. On returning that setto to their sovereign their com­mission and their absolute power over their commands came to an end, and they were pretty much in the position of a re­tired general officer in the modern British army or an ex-President of the United States. The commission extorted from his sovereign by Tokugawa Iyeyasu and by him transmitted to a line of fourteen successors was something vastly different from this. It was a commission to rule the Empire and to maintain peace within its borders, a commission whose terms empowered the Tokugawa to make the throne of Japan a plaything and its occupants hapless and helpless puppets. However, it is the rule that men reap as they or their ancestors have sown (Jigo jitoku); with a sucession of sovereigns of the calibre of Tenchi Tenno and the Emperor Kwammu, a Yoritomo, a Hojo, an Ashikaga, a Tokugawa domination would alike have been unnecessary and—impossible.

During the century and a half that followed the Reform of Taikwa (645) no soldier had found it possible to achieve for himself a leading position at Court and in the councils of the Empire by military merit pure and simple. The few commanders who had attained high rank and office had done so not in consequence of any brilliant exploits in war, but in virtue of their birth and family connections. Saka-no-Uye no Tamura Maro, the descendant of the Korean Achi no Omi, was not only the first to bear the title of Sei-i-tai-Shogun, but he was also the first of the warrior statesmen of Japan. After his victorious return in 802 he was raised to the junior grade of the third rank, was made Minister of Justice, then Sangi, and shortly after Chunagon. When civil war threatened in 810 he was en­trusted with the supreme military command and advanced to the office of Dainagon. As at that date (and for a good many years before) there was no Chancellor of the Empire, and no Minister of the Left, the Dainagon was the second subject in the Empire.

Before passing on from the reign of Kwammu it may be well to advert briefly to the most serious administrative problems he had to grapple with. In 797 a decree was issued stating that taxes were collected in order to assist the people in times of drought or famine or such calamities. “Cash or cloth cannot be used as food. It is understood that at the present time the officials are receiving cash in payment of taxes, but they should bear in mind the reason for taxation and receive cash no longer”. In the following year (798) another decree appeared asserting that the use of coin was to give general convenience to all alike, but that the officials and farmers in the five provinces around Kyoto were hoarding too much money while there was not sufficient in the city. “This is contrary to our intention to confer equal benefit on all, and it is strictly forbidden. All possessed of means must contribute money, and these taxes must be paid in cash. Those guilty of secreting money will receive the punishment of law breakers.”

At first blush these edicts may well strike one as being glaringly inconsistent with each other. But they are really nothing of the kind. Kyoto was the one great entrepôt of the Empire, drawing annual supplies of one sort or another from every one of the sixty-five provinces of Japan. Not only were the Government storehouses well furnished with rice and the produce of other taxes, but the nobles and officials who owned large estates in the country were also receiving constant supplies from the provinces. In Kyoto there was likely to be little or no question of dearth. There it was not so much a matter of the necessaries as of the comforts, and even the luxuries of life. The long list of shops for the sale of some eighty different articles in the two sections of the city is a most valuable document for the economic history of contemporary Japan. In a community which had attained to such a degree of wealth and culture, a mere natural economy was no longer possible, and hence a deficiency of metallic money as a circulating medium was a serious matter indeed.

But outside the capital and the home provinces the case was vastly different. In the provinces, each district,—nay, each village and not infrequently each household,—was dependent on its own resources alone. There was but little commerce; and such trade as there was could be conducted by means of barter without serious inconvenience. What here excited the apprehension of the authorities was something of vastly graver import than a deficiency of the circulating medium,—even in the capital. Droughts, floods, typhoons, locusts, volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, tidal waves,—all meaning the failure or destruction of crops—and then famine, when the mortality was tremendous, and cases of cannibalism were not unknown. And not infrequently famine was accompanied or followed by devastating plagues and pestilences. The Six National Histories are greatly occupied with the record of such calamities when they condescend to notice anything so very common as the common people who constituted more than ninety-nine per cent, of the population of Japan.

To provide satisfactory solutions for all the varied pro­blems growing out of this condition of affairs proved a harder task than the curbing of the undue influence of the Buddhist priesthood and the subjection of Ainu-land. Hence Kwammu’s strenuous road-making and bridge-building, his abolition of the barriers, and his untiring efforts to facilitate inter-communication throughout the Empire. Hence his dams and re servoirs and water-courses and irrigation projects. Hence his solicitude about the safety of the Government storehouses in the provinces, and, later, in the districts. And hence his eagerness to find honest and efficient men to serve as provincial and district officers, and his persistent endeavour to hold them to the faithful and intelligent discharge of their duties.

It was in Kwammu’s reign that the due apportionment of the proceeds of the provincial land-tax or rice-tax was finally settled. The generic name for this tax was Sozei or Kwanto; and it was distributed under the three heads of Seizci (principal tax), Kuge (Government Office), and Zatto (Miscellaneous Rice). The Seizci or principal tax was in its turn distributed into three portions. One of these had to be sent to the capital, another had to be stored permanently in the provincial (or district) granary, while the third could be advanced to needy farmers as a loan.

The third main division of the generic tax, the Zatto or “Miscellaneous Rice”, was devoted to such purposes as the repair of the Government buildings and post-stations, of embankments, ponds, and ditches, the support of shrines and temples and the provincial school, official pastures, emergency fund, and the support of communities of Ainu prisoners of war (in some provinces). The Zatto or “Miscellaneous Rice” portion of the Land-tax was also available for loans to needy farmers.

It was the Kuge (Government Office) portion of the tax that proved, if not most important, at all events most troublesome to the secretariat of the Central Government in Kyoto. As a matter of fact its amount sometimes exceeded any one of the other two classes of the Sozei, which as a rule were generally equal to each other in value. Rut sometimes it fell much short of any of the other two divisions. Its purpose was to supply deficiencies, if any, in the other two classes; whatever surplus remained was divided among the Provincial Governor and his staff. It was, in fact, a kind of salary payable according to results. Dr. Asakawa has set forth the situation very lucidly indeed. “The object of setting this class apart by itself was evidently to guard against negligence and corruption, and to encourage the honesty and industry of the local officers in matters of taxation, for the amount of their private incomes directly depended on their successful collection and honest use of the So (Land-tax). The edicts addressed to them continually referred to the Kuge, and appealed to their intimate interest in it. Granting the ingenuity of this arrangement, one will not fail to note what a strong incentive to abuses it was liable to prove. So long as the personal share of the officers in the revenue of this class (the Kuge) was elastic, so long as they at the same time had charge of all the three classes, and, what is more, so long as they were authorised to loan the rice of this class, as well as nearly all of the other classes, it would have been untrue to their human nature not to attempt to appropriate the whole revenue of the Kuge, no matter whether there was a deficit or not, by manipulating the accounts of other items, and then to loan it to the people, and collect it and its interest before any other loan.” Kwammu Tenno was fully alive to these very natural considerations, and appointed trustworthy officers to visit all the provinces and submit the Governors to a very strict audit of the Kuge. But unfortunately for the best interests of the Empire, Kwammu, the ci-devant schoolmaster, was one of the very few workaday sovereigns of Japan.

However, even by the time of Kwammu the Land-tax was far from furnishing the whole, or even the major portion, of the national revenue. Here we find another strange analogy between post-Taikwa and post-Tokugawa Japan. During the eleven and a half years between January 1868 and June 1879 the total revenue of the Empire amounted to 535,127,463 yen, and of this no less a sum than 405,402,922 yen was the product of the Land-tax. In 1905, the gross national annual revenue was returned at 280,000,000 yen, and of this amount less than 61,000,000 yen was credited to the impot fonder. In other words, previous to 1879 the Land-tax had furnished 75 per cent, of the gross national income; in 1905 it contributed a little over 20 per cent, of the ordinary receipts of the Treasury. In 645 the Cho and Yo (Corrée) had not been very irksome. By the tenth century they had become the financial mainstay of the administration. Before Kwammu’s time we hear of as many as 20,000, 30,000, and even 60,000 men being employed on corrée work in connection with embankments and irrigation works in various provinces. In removing the capital from Nara to Nagaoka no fewer than 314,000 men were held to forced labour for the space of seven months, all of whom had to be maintained by a commuted labour-tax levied on the villages and districts from which they had been drawn. The conveyance of the provincial taxes to the capital was a charge upon the tax­payers, and a very onerous charge it was.

However in course of time it was the Cho, or tax in textiles, in tools, in metals, in coin, or in any of the various special staples of the provinces that furnished the major portion—as much as four-ninths—of the revenue paid into the Government warehouses in Kyoto. In connection with this tax a constant and unremitting warfare against short weight, scant measure, and shoddy quality had to be maintained.

CHAPTER VI. FROM TENCHI TO KWAMMU. (662 TO 782 A.D.)

CHAPTER VII. THE EMPEROR KWAMMU. (782 TO 805 A.D.)

CHAPTER VIII. THE LEARNED EMPERORS. (806 TO 850 A.D.)